She Says [French]

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Award-winning American poet Marilyn Hacker offers the brilliance of Lebanese poet V nus Khoury-Ghata in an exquisite translation

She says
the earth is so vast one can't help but be lost like water from a broken jug
There is no fortress against the wind
the winter wanderer must count on the compassion of walls-from "She Says"

Translated by celebrated American poet Marilyn Hacker, V nus Khoury-Ghata's She Says explores the mythic and confessional attractions and repulsions of the French and Arabic imaginations with poems that open like "a suitcase filled with alphabets." Sex, barrenness, grief, and death-the backdrop of a war-ravaged country-are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent by lines often jagged and spare, their music unhaltered. Khoury-Ghata is a vital voice in both her native and adopted languages and we are pleased to present this important collection in English.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: French
• ISBN: 1555973833
• ISBN13: 9781555973834
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

De(con)struction & (re)construction of words

On first reading of Vénus Khoury-Ghata's She Says I feared that I must somehow be intellectually stunted. I didn't get it and I mean that in the worse sense of the phrase. I found myself reading page after page wondering when I would get it. I then became angry at her for writing an entire collection of poems that I, an MFA student, did not get. I thought perhaps something crucial had been lost in the in the transition between Khoury-Ghata's maternal Arabic thoughts, her school-bred French écriture and Hacker's English. So I read the poems backwards, read the original French texts (I'm mostly bilingual) and still I was lost. So I had an herbal remedy. and a bubble bath. My mind began following the archipelago of bubbles floating in my tub water and I had an epiphany. I grabbed the book again. My mind had been tight, constricted and rigid, a state not conducive to playfulness. My very being had worked against the poet. This time I let her words play with me, rearrange me. And I got it. Her poetry rests in a sacred place where words do not wish to be disturbed into order, where chaos reigns. And yet each poem resonates with a concreteness, a sadness. a stream draws a closed circle around her house/once stepped across the water turns like bad milk. (p. 73) I feel a sense of regret and mortality in her final lines. It's as if she knows the potentialities in our self-expression. The sadness I feel is our knowing that it can only exist here, confined within these pages. At times I considered that English is too limiting a language to ever convey Khoury-Ghata's thoughts. This seams certainly true with the poem that begins "Les morts dit-elle/sont clos sur eux-mêmes comme le sang." (p. 64) "Morts" could easily be read as "mots" the French word for "Word," so that the English translation would read, " The words she says/are closed in upon themselves like blood," instead of "The dead she says." And yet there are places where the English translations resonate more strongly. On pgs 16-17, the sounds in "letters buried in their silicate vestments/become silenced sounds in the silenced silt" reveals more than in "des lettres enfouies dans leur vêtement de silice/devenues sons éteints dans la vase éteinte." I envy Khoury-Ghata. Living in the space between two languages is in many ways a literary blessing. Her natural detachment from the French language allows her to play with words in a way that most of never could. I am reminded of Natalie Goldberg's thoughts on writing in her book Writing Down the Bones. She says that if we think "cut the daisy from my throat," then that is precisely what we should write down. But we censor ourselves, and in doing so we limit ourselves. Khoury-Ghata is consciously fighting against our urge to order and make sense of our words. She writes "One marries the words of one's own language/to settle down/ traveling is for the others/who borrow lines the way they take the train." It is this traveling that I

Surrealist Poet With A Heart

I thought this book was fabulous! It is not often that we encounter, either in literature or in art, a marriage of surrealistic imagery with sincere emotion. Frequently, it seems that when surrealism becomes a major component in a literary work, the result is a barrage of strange and disconnected images holding little meaning beyond the apparent. few writers are able to instill such works with true heart and soul as does Venus-Khoury-Gata. The fantastic images that fill the pages of her book are rich in layers of metaphorical meaning, vibrant with the feeling she attaches to each. She thereby miraculously transforms these unexpected and dislocted objects--a "drainpipe" connecting the mouth of the petitioner to the ear of God, the "toe's" of apple trees--into vehicles of the soul which she definitely bares here. Much is to be said, as well, for the undoubtedly challenging job of translation completed here by poet Marilyn Hacker. The effort involved in such a feat, not to mention the result, dazzles the mind.

Reviewing what She Said

Venus Khoury-Ghata is a master of words. She swims in language, dives in her alphabet soup, and splashes us until we drip. She Says is a compilation of poems that converse with each other, wink at each other. Each poem bursts as you read it, like bubble wrap, when you squeeze one of its tight bulbs. Before I started reading She Says, I skimmed the book, and was struck by the fact that the poems do not have titles. Well, the first line of each poem serves as a title. In the table of contents, these lines stand under each other, and read as a poem: Words -In those days I know now words declaimed the wind -Words -Where do words come from? -How to find the name of the fisherman who hooked the first word -The prudent man looped his family to his belt -Language at that time opened fire on every noise -What do we know about the alphabets which didn't survive the rising of waters -The words which spring up on the borders of lips retain their terrors -Words, she says, used to be wolves -Words, she says, are like the rain everyone knows how to make them -It was there and nowhere else -The rain had few followers at that time -Guilty of repeated forgetfulness -There are words from poor peoples' gardens that crossbreed iron and thorns Before I actually started reading the book, I was reading it. Though some have mentioned that She Says lacks punctuation, or that Khoury-Ghata's use of negative space is her only punctuation, I noticed the use of question marks. This fact begs the question-why question marks, and not periods? Perhaps because periods seal declarative sentences, and Khoury-Ghata does not want to seal the issue of language--its potential and transcendence; she wants to unfold it. She is not declaring, she is asking. Why not use commas (they do not seal)? Commas make a reader pause, and Khoury-Ghata is working with impulse. She Says cannot have commas, like a rollercoaster cannot have commas. The lack of punctuation also makes words, thoughts, and ideas bleed into each other, much like our thinking process. Khoury-Ghata is thinking on paper. She Says is a book you have to read and reread. The images are exquisitely chosen and precisely placed, yet it appears effortless. These poems feed you. After reading them, you are full, satisfied, like a three year old after eating a bowl of alphabet soup the size of its head.

Elle Dit

Venus Khoury-Ghata exemplifies a true denizen of a multilingual and polyphonic world with her ability to swing back and forth between languages and, thus, disparate modes of thought to establish a new and unique manner in utilizing language. Marilyn Hacker shares a similar space by being Khoury-Ghata's translator in She Says. As a renown poet, herself, Hacker is able to also inhabit a transliminal lingual and literary area by moving from American English to French to read Khoury-Ghata, but has to return to English with her subsequent translation of Khoury-Ghata's verse. She seems to do this seamlessly as her translations of the French follow as comfortably as possible and Hacker's voice remains a whisper in those transliterations. In She Says, Khoury-Ghata moves in between languages and worlds, the real and the surreal, and she uses words and phrases that spark the imagination and disrupt our usual tropes. On p. 67, she writes - "Because there's no shortage of summers the days are like conceited generals the nights like flashy women the moon is the tool they work with it regulates their urges and their blood" "But it sometimes happens that they dream a bit of widowhood and darknesses The sesame seeds sewn in their skirts weigh down their shadows the lampposts bow gently as they pass by and the fireflies part the air with their two hands" Khoury-Ghata's lack of punctuation in She Says helps her verse to flow like billowing clouds. Her use of negative space is sparse and purposeful and serves as her only actual punctuation. I found her economic use of verse to be both fascinating and inspiring. As Khoury-Ghata states in the proceeding section titled "Why I Write in French," she quotes Andre Brincourt who says that "`the Francophone culture is rich in the diversity of the tongues which nourish it.'" She is staggering in her ability to flow between languages and modes of thought and this I believe will help to strengthen the French language overall. She Says is a good portent for those of us who are still trying to deal with the imposition of colonizing languages and the resulting trauma in trying to reconcile maternal and former tongues with the new dominant language. Language must be dynamic to mutate and evolve, otherwise it becomes stagnant and dies. And along the lines of Brincourt and Khoury-Ghata, I believe that such tension between dominant and non-dominant languages can only serve to strengthen language in general and increase the level of communication among the human species. As Khoury-Ghata writes, "Writing in Arabic by means of French doesn't prevent me from listening attentively to the latter..." These are words to live by as someone who also seeks to broadcast the different cultural signals that every individual receives.

She Says

For me, poet, Venus Khoury-Ghata is a revelation of the serendipitous union between the middle-Eastern imagination and the French sensibility, and I now can't imagine a library or a life without the cryptic, satiric, sad and fragmented dream world contained in this bilingual book "Cold-bodied men are immured in her walls," she writes on page 59, " she retains their reproachful looks/ and that way of tilting their heads backwards/ as if they were discovering a new star...Their earthy names are strewn on her sheets which are blue with cold." The poems of this Lebanese writer glitter with fabulist imagery that seems to roam far-reaching, mythic plains previously unvisited, even in fairy tales. Words, she says, used to be wolves, and "In her dreams she thinks she is awake/ a lame angel is sweeping her kitchen/ a herd of buffalo has been let loose in her lamp." Khoury-Ghata is one in a distinguished line of Eastern-European and Middle-Eastern writers who use the French language as a refuge from the terrors of home, and in the process require it to accommodate their own cultural nuances of myth, aspiration and anxiety. Connecting her with the French surrealist tradition at the same time as setting her apart, translator, Marilyn Hacker, says in the introduction: "we are encouraged to take the surreal elements as given, not as representing something other than themselves." And always through the elements, there is the disembodied, lone, dreaming figure of woman as survivor, as heroine and as creator, and always she fulfils her own magic, daring to turn tradition against itself: "Spitting in the wind brings happiness, she says/ and she calls down the wicked old winds on the winter." The journey takes place in the universal imagination, and calls to mind at once the whole surrealist and magical tradition as well as the oldest myths and legends of civilization. On page 79, the poet writes, "The angels listening to her yawn politely behind their hands,/ convinced she's got the wrong plain and the wrong dream/ that she's knitting with an endless strand/ to the great despair of her listeners who leave quietly on their wing tips." In an afterword, Khoury-Ghata says that her (prizewinning) novels, written in French, "served me as a mask behind which I could move through the fires which had emerged from my pen while my countrymen and women walked through gunfire with uncovered faces." Her absence from her mother country, "taking shelter behind a white page while shells rained down on Beirut," led her to use the pen as her weapon, she says, and in exile, "what I made up (became) more real than what had been buried under a weight of silence and omission." Not surprisingly, her poems show a preoccupation with language, and in this book, her section, "Les Mots", or "Words," she questions the nature and origin of language, reverting to rewrite the beginning of the word. The first words she writes here are: " In those days I know now words declaimed the win